‘Good God, no!’ I cried, shocked for the first time today. ‘What a dreadful …! I’ve never been so …!’

‘Well, who the devil are you, then, and how did you get in here?’

We sorted it out after a while and soon I had wrung from him his slow consent to my having a sight of the abominable Mass.

As I left the Club, I remarked an inky wretch, shaking with alcohol, whining and carneying to the Hall Porter: I wished him joy of his interview.

The Earl’s house was but a step away. It was one of those Belgravian massifs with fronts like old Euston Station. The servants in such houses are still English (where do they find them?) and the step at the front door is so designed that the butler, when he opens the door, looms over you dauntingly. The one who loomed in answer to my ring was a fine, well-grown specimen who had clearly eaten up every scrap of his gruel when he was a nursing butler. His manner was civil, if condescending, but his eye said that he knew all about gents who wanted to read in the master’s library. He stripped me of hat, coat, and umbrella with the ease of a skilled craftsman and led me along a gallery of statuary towards the library. The sculpture was astonishingly fine and of a fruitiness not usually seen outside the rare Supplement to the Museo Borbonico. I could not resist pausing in front of an unusually explicit ‘Leda and the Swan’: I understood at last how the swan had managed the trick. You’d never believe it.

At the end of the gallery there was a sort of vestibule lit only by a concealed ray of light playing on a terminal figure of Pan – the Tree with one Branch – which, as we passed, suddenly became a drinking-fountain in the most dramatic and peculiar way. The butler shunted me into the library, indicated the librarian’s desk and left me to my own devices – or solitary vices, as I dare say he thought. I ambled down an alley of shelves crammed with a bewildering accumulation of priceless, richly-bound filth and rubbish. Nerciat rubbed shoulders with D.H. Lawrence, the Large Paper set of de Sade (Illustrated by Austin Osman Spare) jostled an incunable Hermes Trismegistus, and ten different editions of L’Histoire d’O were piquant bedfellows to De la Bodin’s Démonomanie des Sorciers.

The Earl’s librarian was a pretty slip of a girl with circles under her eyes. She didn’t look as though she got much time for reading.

‘Are you Green Girls in Paris?’ she asked. I thought about it.

‘No, I’m more the Mass of S. Sécaire, really.’